Tag Archives: Interpreting Classical Economics

1.0 Introduction Piero Sraffa wrote down his 'first equations' in 1927, for an economy without a surplus. D3/12/5 starts with these equations for an economy with three produced commodities. I always thought that they did not make dimensional sense, but Garegnani (2005) argues otherwise. This post details Garegnani's argument, albeit with my own notation. There are arguments about how and why Sraffa started on his research project I do not address here. The question is how did he relate...

Marx can be read as both a continuation and a critique of classical economics. A not-too-radical reading might emphasize his claim to find distinctions in economic theory glossed over by classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. According to Marx, classical economists (as opposed to vulgar economists such as Frédéric Bastiat, Jean-Baptiste Say, and and Nassau William Senior) penetrated beneath surface phenomena to reveal the anatomy of capitalism. A more radical reading...